Alternatives to the Conference Status Quo: Addressing the Learning Needs of Emergency Medicine Residents

The learning needs of emergency medicine residents are not being well addressed by the currently prevalent conference format of serial hour-long lectures. Although the emergency medicine education literature is beginning to trend toward alternate approaches to emergency medicine resident education,1 implementation of new educational paradigms remains a challenge. In this article, we describe the design and implementation of structural changes to a residency's didactic conferences using methods based in educational theory and derived principles, and detail the experience of a 4-year emergency medicine residency program piloting a new curriculum to better adapt conference education to the learning needs of its residents.